Predatory pricing? They have a public API that anyone can use for a public rate. There is no predatory pricing here.

The Claude Code endpoint is a private API. They’re free to control usage of their private API.

Predatory pricing is selling something below cost to acquire/maintain market dominance.

The Claude subscription used for Claude Code is to all appearances being sold substantially below the cost to run it, and it certainly seems that this is being done to maintain Claude Code's market dominance and force out competitors who cannot afford to subsidize LLM inference in the same way such as OpenCode.

It's not a matter of there being a public API, I don't believe they are obligated to offer one at all, it's a matter of the Claude Subscription being priced fairly so that OpenCode (on top of, say, gemini) can be competitive.

The modern consumer benefit doctrine means predatory pricing is impossible to prosecute in 99% of cases. I’m not saying it’s right, but legally it is toothless.

This is true... in the US (though there is still that 1%). Anthropic operates globally and the US isn't the only country who ever realized it might be an issue.

> Predatory pricing is selling something below cost to acquire/maintain market dominance.

Yet they have to acquire market dominance in a meaningful market first if you want to prosecute, otherwise it's just a failed business strategy. Like that company selling movie tickets bellow cost.

Claude code is so successful that they could silence the api to protect the moat.

I’m surprised they didn’t go with the option of offering opus 4.6 to Claude code only.

The API is really expensive compared to a Max subscription! So they're probably making a lot of money (or at least losing much less) via the API. I don't think it's going anywhere. Worst case scenario they could raise the price even more.

That’s what OpenAI is doing with GPT-5.2-Codex

What makes it predatory?

The Claude subscription (i.e. the pro and max plans, not the API) is sold at what appears to be well below cost in what appears to be a blatant attempt to preserve/create market dominance for claude code, destroying competitors by making it impossible to compete without also having a war chest of money to give away.

You’re making a big assumption. LLM providers aren’t necessarily taking a loss on the marginal cost of inference. It’s when you include R&D and training costs that it requires the capital inputs. They’ve come out and said as much.

The Claude Code plans may not be operating at a loss either. Most people don’t use up 100% of their plan. Few people do. A lot of it goes idle.

If you check the actual tokens consumption and compare it to the API you will find a factor 10.

Training models cost tens of millions, their revenues from sub + api are well above hundreds of millions.

If you look at minimax IPO data, you can see that they spent 3x their revenue on "cloud bills".

So yes, it's probable that they do subsidize inference through subscriptions in order to capture market.

No inferrence provider is profitable, and most run on VC money to serve customers.

Now dig into copilot plus and how they price the premium requests. The math is not mathing, they are aggressively trying to capture the market.